Farm status
Intel GPUs
3 running Einstein gravity wave work
2 running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
All off
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Hardware updates
I got another of the i7-8700’s installed this week. It replaces an i7-6700. I ended up taking it to a local PC shop. They didn’t do a good job. They left the front case fan unplugged and the power wiring for the motherboard wasn’t passed through the back as its supposed to. I fixed the case fan up myself, it just needed the two rear fans to be on a Y splitter so there was a fan header free on the motherboard for the front case fan. When I feel inclined I will fix up the power wiring, meanwhile its crunching away.
The plan is to replace my eight i7-6700’s (4 cores/8 threads) with six i7-8700’s (6 cores/12 threads). That grows the core count while reducing the number of physical machines. Two have been swapped out already. The rest just need an on-site PC assembler.
Software updates
We got an updated Linux kernel in stretch-backports. It installed fine on one of the Intel GPU machines. When I went to install it on one of the Nvidia GPU machines however It wouldn’t boot. It left a blank screen and I couldn’t ssh into it. I had to boot using the older kernel. There is a Debian bug raised for it (901919). They have since resolved it by patching the Nvidia drivers, but they haven’t yet made it to stretch-backports.
2 comments:
hi Mark,
Just a quick question, How many hrs does you pi crunch work unit? Do you need a small fan to dissipate the heat from the Pi or just using the factory heat sink?
The Einstein BRP4 work units are taking around 11hous, 20 minutes. Seti multibeam are about 11 hours.
The Pi doesn’t come with a heatsink, I have to add my own. I also have fans on the case for airflow. The BitScope blades don’t have enough room for a heatsink. See http://marksrpicluster.blogspot.com/2018/09/bitscope-rack-20-build-part-1.html for details.
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